a virtual machine

[S. Musman]

>Does anyone have any references or links to documentation about
>a virtual machine that might be suitable?

I replied personally to Bill House, because I thought the discussion
had sortof gone beyond this issue, but a place to start might be to
take a look at the POPLOG virtual machine. It currently has Common
Lisp, Prolog, ML and POP-11 built on top of it. I've also heard of
accademic implementations of Scheme and C that sit atop it. It's
designed for flexibility rather than speed, and because it's rather
old (developed originally in the 70's) it is rather CISC in nature
(which is good for a VM) and not really designed to support data-typed
languages with efficiency (e.g. the POPLOG implementation of CL
pretty much ignores compiler directives regarding data types).

Anyway, the server was down the last time I checked, but if you check
out:

http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/adrianh/poplog.html

I'm pretty sure I remember a pointer to papers and information about
the POPLOG VM.

I'm not advocating this specifically, but it is a source of valuabale
information regarding a VM that is flexible. The VM for CLISP has
many features to it's credit also.

				-- Scott

-- 

                                 Scott Musman
  _______________________        Intelligent Systems Division
  |    o                |        Integrated Management Services, Inc
  |     \o|             |        2101 Wilson Blvd, Suite 916
  |       \_            |        Arlington, Va, 22201
  |       \ \           |        (IMSI)703-528-0334 (Side Out)703-748-0707
                                 musman@imsihq.imsidc.com
                                 http://airborne.nrl.navy.mil/~musman/